


Proper Identification

by Chaerring



Series: Very Superstitious [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fantasy AU, Gen, If the Avengers weren't human..., Peggy is a fairy too, Pepper Pov, Pepper is a fairy, Steve is a shining example of humanity, Tony is a demon that saunters vaguely upward
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-07 12:23:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/431152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaerring/pseuds/Chaerring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The evolution of Virginia the practical fairy into Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, and Tony Stark's girlfriend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own anyone.
> 
> Thank you so much to TheGreatSporkWielder for beta-ing.
> 
> This (like most of my things) became much longer than it was originally intended to be, but Pepper as a fairy is very dear to my heart.

The number one longstanding unresolved bet going on among the Stark Industries employees is whether or not Pepper Potts is human. She's aware of the bet, and refuses to weigh in on either side, but both sides have reasonable arguments and evidence to support their causes just from observation. 

Some of her employees believe wholeheartedly that their boss can't be anything except human, because no other race deals with so many varied persons and beings on a daily basis without losing their cool. There's always some race that has a feud or can't stand the sight or smell of another race. For vampires, it's ifrits; for shifters, it's other shifters higher or lower on the food chain than them. The only race that has no blood feud or instinct against another one is the humans. Of course, their individual tolerances were something else entirely. 

On the other side of the coin, the rest of the participants in the bet believe Pepper can't possibly be human because of the sheer amount of work and shit she deals with. They don't believe a human could handle that kind of stress management, not without being something else, at least by half, enough to be considered inhuman. For this they used to cite her ability to resist the demon that is Tony Stark, but they've changed it to the proof of her pulling him into a monogamous relationship. The new citation is the more impossible thing, so it worked out well for them.

The technical answer to the bet is that Pepper is not human, or rather only a very small smidgen of her is human, but it doesn't matter because even if she was human she would do the same job in the same way. Pepper being mostly a fairy didn't make her job any easier at any point in time. She could have used magic to make it easier for herself, and sometimes (okay a lot of the time) she did use magic on little things like keeping her feet from hurting when she wore heels or reheating her coffee, but as far as actually running the company was concerned, Pepper kept her magic off of it.

Pepper's smidgen of human ancestry was very old, possibly from before the fall of Rome, judging by the rate of fairy reproduction and growth. The human blood trickled through Pepper's family line. For a while it was something to be proud of. Human blood was known to jump start little fairies' imaginations and give them legendary creative skills, and that's what it did mostly, until it got to Pepper, called Virginia at the time.  
Virginia was the odd child in fairy culture. Fairies prized art and creativity. They kept no schedules and had no concern to speak of for the passage of time due to their long lives and distance from human affairs. It wasn't strange for fairy children to run about quickly like shorter lived races and then learn to slow down by the time they reached the halfway point to their maturity at one hundred and fifty years old. 

Only, Virginia didn't grow out of it. At two hundred she was still moving just as quickly as she had been at fifty. None of the older fairies, save her parents, could bring themselves to comment on it because she was so helpful. Things just seemed to get done when Virginia got involved. Like all fairies, she had an extra talent. Most fairies had quick feet, seer sight, or a gift of tongues. All those things could be achieved with quick spells, of course, but each fairy was born with a special little extra something. 

Virginia could identify people by race with simply her eyes. It was a much more practical gift than what a fairy usually had, and one that had only appeared a few times in their recorded history. Rumors claimed she was so strange because of the human blood, that it had left her family alone for so long it wasn't any wonder she ended up so decidedly unimaginative and practical. She was loved anyway, though, because all fairy children are precious, but certain allowances were made when she was involved. 

_"Try not to be too late for our picnic, darlings, Virginia planned this one after all."_

_"Virginia thought it might be better if she planned the set of our art display. I know she's already organizing the festival, but she insisted..."_

It wasn't until Virginia was nearly of age that she was told she had options. By that time there were very few fairies left outside of the Courts and the Hills. There was so much iron in the human world it was harder for them to bear it even if they weren't quite as sensitive as the old tales claimed they were. More and more frequently the world was a place of war and carnage, even in civilized places. The majority of fairies chose to abandon those sorrows instead of live in them, but there were a few who stayed and only returned to the Hills when they chose to pass on to their next life.

Virginia was two hundred and eighty five when her distant cousin, Margaret returned to the Hill. She was so much older than she had been when she had left less than a hundred human years previous. Some people claimed she had used up her magic protecting humans, or specifically a human man. Virginia didn't care. She just wanted to know everything she could about the human world. So often she heard whispers of how much she was like a human, that her blood made her too odd. 

She fell a little in love with Margaret when the older fairy had recovered some of her youth and sent Virginia a polite request to meet with her over lunch at a specific time, insisting that Virginia call her Peggy, not Margaret. 

_"I've heard about you, Virginia. Come in, sit down. I’m sure you must have questions."_

Virginia couldn't stop the way her nose wrinkles. It never felt like her name. She wanted something different and Peggy gave her options. Peggy told her about the military, about every minute of every day being scheduled, about the heart humans have, about how they love and hate. Virginia _wanted_ it. Shortly before Virginia’s coming of age, Peggy gave Virginia a folder of strange papers and images not painted, but somehow captured even more clearly than a painting. Her dear cousin spoke to her about a good man, and Virginia knew Margaret hadn't left the world of a broken heart or spent magic, but of a life she felt fulfilled. 

Virginia did her research and preparations through the other fae that still lived in the world. Brownies and elves who still had a place among the humans were glad to help her learn what she wanted, even if it was only to spite the older fairies. When she turned three hundred and was free of her parent's binding spells, Virginia selected a last name, “Potts,” for her mother's paint pots and her father's gardening pots, applied a small sturdy glamour upon herself, and left with a trading caravan to go to a university and see the human world for herself.  
Virginia felt more at home in the human world than she ever had under the Hills or visiting the Courts. The presence of so much iron didn't faze her, and she reveled in the control she had over her life. Humans understood the importance of time, even if some of them were still late, it was made up for with the fact that some of them actually appeared earlier than scheduled. Virginia had never witnessed that before. She also had never put her special talent to such work before.

Everywhere she looked there were other beings. Her racial cousins, the other fae, and creatures she had never encountered before: shifters of every animal, vampires, and so many different types of magic users. Even if that hadn't been enough for her, there were ever present humans and their science, which seemed more like magic the more Virginia saw. 

She graduated with highest honors and had to decide what to do with her life. She began applying to various companies and offices that didn't require her to divulge her race or blood. It was Stark Industries she truly wanted, though. It was the only company that didn't even ask what race its employees were. Fortunately, Stark Industries saw something in her that they liked and Virginia was accepted into their secretarial pool. It didn't bother her that the company achieved its claim to fame through weapons development because she knew she would outlive whatever squabbles the humans had. The only thing Virginia cared about was finally putting her talents and skills to their proper use.

Virginia had only been there three months when she spotted an accounting error. It was small, miniscule, and ridiculous in a company like Stark Industries. Nothing so significant to signal fraud, embezzlement, or any of the other tricks humans played on each other for ill gain, but it was still wrong. She tried to bring it to her supervisors' attentions, and failed to get them to see her concern. It drove her nuts. She couldn't stand to let any sort of error pass across her desk. It would mean she wasn't doing her job correctly.

Unable to let the issue go, Virginia charged her way through the floors of Stark Industries and into Tony Stark's office, using her homemade version of pepper spray to take care of his security guards. She had frozen once she finally saw her boss. Her infallible eyes that had never misled her were telling her that he boss was a _demon_. Demons were the nightmares of the Hills and Courts; in ancient times, ancient for Fae, not for humans, the demons were a group of fae that had lost a war to the fairies over the lands of the Hills. They were cast out into the inhospitable terrain of the human world and their magic turned on them; they became something no one understood and took it out on all the other races. 

When Virginia was a very young child her mother had told her stories about demons eating fairy children. They were the reasons for the parental protections, spells that kept fairy children from traveling too far before their three hundredth year. Yet, here Virginia was, not even a decade past her coming-of-age and she was face to face with a demon. _Working_ for a demon. The thought was entirely thrilling. Especially when it seemed he had no clue what she was a fairy at all.

_"Well, it must have been something important if you're willing to get **arrested** for it. Are you just going to stand there and wait for the handcuffs?_ "

Mister Stark's snide tone jolted Virginia back to herself, and she straightened, remembering her reason for seeking him out.

_"There is an error in one of the accounting records and none of my supervisors would investigate it, or allow me to."_

Virginia held herself as straight as a board waiting for him to fire her, or mention lawyers. Instead, he smirked.

_"Congratulations, Pepper. You passed the test, so I'm going to offer you a new job as my personal assistant."_

_"Pepper?"_

_"That's what you used on my guards, right? Pepper spray, so you're Pepper. Got a last name?"_

Something inside Virginia slotted into place and she smiled.

_"Potts, Mister Stark. I'm Virginia Potts."_

_"Pepper Potts. I like it. It's got that alliteration thing going on. Now, there's a few things you need to know about being my assistant..."_

The longer Pepper held onto her position as Tony's assistant the more she learned about him. For a while she took a thrill in knowing she was working for a fairy's enemy, but it didn't take her long to forget about what they were entirely. 

To her mind they quickly became just Tony and Pepper.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pepper as Tony's assistant, and the beginning of the first movie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Don't own any characters.
> 
> Thanks to TheGreatSporkWielder for beta-ing.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone reading, kudos leaving, and commenting on this. I really appreciate it.

Working for Tony, to Pepper, was everything she ever wanted. It challenged her and forced her to put all of her skills to the test. Her eyes were useful in dealing with the various creatures that wanted to do business with Stark Industries and even more useful in dealing with Tony's numerous flings. It was incredibly handy to be able to tell when throwing one of his bedfellows out would require a fire extinguisher or the threat of some other exploitable weakness. It was only a few months before she had turned one of the unused closets in Tony's home into a storage room for everything from silver halide to use on shifters to honey for brownies. 

Besides finding out that Tony liked variety in his bed partners, Pepper quickly learned a number of other things about Tony, but the thing that surprised her the most was his age. He was exactly as old as he looked. For a fairy who had grown up under the Hills, where it took three hundred years simply to reach the end of adolescence, his age was baffling, especially when Pepper knew demons were supposed to age as slowly as fairies. They were cousin races, much like the other fae. It wasn't until Pepper realized Tony never used his own magic that she began to understand. 

The magic in Pepper's veins was what kept her young. The Hills themselves were nothing but magic. She had ate, slept, and breathed it all her life. Demons, they were cast out and their magic changed; it warped and turned against them, eating their minds as they aged because they had no network to reinforce or feed into them. Tony didn't touch his magic. Not for anything. He had no problem coercing or paying others into doing magic for him, but he left his own alone. Eventually, while helping Rhodey into a guestroom one night Pepper learned that Tony had sealed off his magic. He had made it untouchable to anyone, but mostly himself, as though he didn't trust himself not to succumb to the temptation.

It shattered Pepper's heart to pieces. Magic was such an integral part of her life; she couldn't begin to comprehend what her life would be like without it. She wanted to take her magic and press it into Tony's veins. She wanted to smooth away the lines beside his eyes and take the few grays out of his hair. She wanted to fix everything for him, but she kept (mostly) to the things in her job description. Instead, Pepper began to let herself age along with him, not a lot, but enough to seem more human. She let her skin become flawed with small stress and laugh lines. 

As tempted as she was to share her birthright with Tony, she found out quickly how little he needed magic. Tony had replaced his magic with human science and engineering. He wielded mathematics and mechanics like her mother wielded a paintbrush or her father, his spade. Pepper was infinitely fascinated with Tony's work process and his inventions. She didn't get to watch him often because she was always cleaning up after him elsewhere, but sometimes JARVIS would let her pull up one of the cameras in his workshop and she'd fill out paperwork to the sound of his cursing and clanking.

It only took her two years to fall irreversibly in love with him.

Pepper should have had a problem with being in love with her demonic boss, but it wasn't a problem at all. She had her revelation one day and, within an hour, she had simply accepted the new self-knowledge as fact. Loving Tony was just like breathing. It was something she did, something she needed to do. It didn't cause her any extra difficulties; she didn't suddenly get more jealous of the people he slept with, even if she finally understood why she had gradually become more forceful when escorting them out of the house. Loving him didn't give her rose colored glasses. Tony was just as frustrating and exasperating after she knew she loved him as beforehand. 

Loving Tony wasn't a problem until Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan made Pepper wish she had pumped as much of her magic as she possibly could into Tony's body until it bled more of her than his own blood. She should have done it even without asking him. Then she would have been able to find him anywhere. No one from Hills, Courts, or the human world would have been able to keep her from him. As it was, she had refrained from giving him even a piece of magic without talking to him about it first. She had been a coward and she paid for it dearly. She bartered and traded everything she could quietly through the company, and even more quietly on her own for locating spells of all kinds. She knew she came _so close_ , more than once, but there was something deflecting her.

Afghanistan nearly broke Pepper and sent her crawling back to the Hills, but she kept herself together, kept the company running smoothly, and waited for Tony's return. Magic or not, she had faith in his infuriating ass.

And then he did return. 

Tony returned, and she was going to tell him everything.

The first time she tried they were in the workshop while he was stretched out with her hand in his chest.

_"Tony? It's going to be okay."_

He had no way of knowing she had wrapped her magic around the shrapnel in his chest, bits of iron that burned into her extra sense like a brand. She couldn't take them out, couldn't stop them from inching further into his heart without the magnet because the iron was too much for her, but she could ease his pain.

_"What? Is it?"_

_"It's gonna be okay."_

Pepper had to say it out loud to believe it. She had him back, not entirely the same, not entirely in one piece, but as sane as he ever was, and she was glad.

_"I'm gonna make this okay."_

She would do everything in her small powers to do so. 

_"Let's hope."_

Pepper was going to explain herself, to tell him everything about what she was and what she could do, but then he opened his mouth and derailed her train of thought and she couldn't do it.

_"I don't have anyone but you."_

She couldn't think for the sudden swell of emotion in her chest. She couldn't concentrate and pull together what she needed to tell him. She had no clue where to start, and the moment passed quickly. Tony moved on, avoiding emotion like the plague, and Pepper was dragged along with him.


End file.
